← New Books Network
New Books Network
Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach, "A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2025)
01:00:11
Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:00]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [01:08]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host, Schneer Zalman Neufield. In their book, A Woman Is Responsible for Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2025, Deborah Kaplan and Elisheva Kaubach lift the veil of silence that has obscured the lives of these women for too long, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a new understanding of the Jewish past. Deborah Kaplan is the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Beyerlein University. Annalis Sheva Kalbach is Salo Witmer Baron professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University. I'm so glad Deborah and Elisheva's new book has brought them to our program. Welcome, both of you.
- [01:59]
Elisheva Kaubach
Thank you.
- [02:00]
Deborah Kaplan
Thank you.
- [02:01]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
So to get started, I'd like for each of you to talk a little bit about your background and what attracted you to this project. And let's begin with El Shaba.
- [02:12]
Elisheva Kaubach
Thank you so much. So I am a historian. For most of my professional life, I have been working on other areas and other subjects, and in the course of many years of teaching and research, these voices and sources repeatedly came up. I want to say that I began my professional life or one of my early positions, which I held for many years, was at Queens College, which is where I met Professor Deborah Kaplan for the first time. And we co taught a course there on the history of Jewish women in the medieval and early modern period. And we realized that there was almost nothing to assign to our students, both in terms of primary sources, but even in terms of surveys. And so we began compiling our own little stash of sources, if you will. This was over 20 years ago, and I think that was one of the things that planted a seed that became this book. But I'll let Deborah talk about other parts of her work and how it led to this trajectory. It's the first time that I've engaged head on with the history of Jewish women. I've looked at other things in the early modern period. And so that's, that's really where this came about.
- [03:57]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Yes, I want to hear from Deborah. I just want to say for some of our listeners who might be junior faculty or graduate students or people who are anticipating becoming scholars, hearing that a book incubated for 20 years might be somewhat discouraging. But obviously you both done a lot in the interim, so this was not the exclusive focus on, of your academic attention.
- [04:24]
Elisheva Kaubach
Correct?
- [04:26]
Deborah Kaplan
That's definitely true. And maybe that's a good place to start and continue the narrative. I would say that in addition to our course, both Elisheva and I were engaged in other research that brought us into various archives, and we were both researching early modern Jewish communities and various aspects of early modern Jewish life in Western Central Europe. Often we found ourselves in archives and libraries, working side by side on parallel projects. And wherever we looked, whatever material each one of us was looking at, we inevitably came across Jewish women and got excited and said, hey, look at this. This is what I found. And oh, well, I found that. And we would sit and we would read, and our stash of sources grew and grew. So it was a work of many years, as you said, and archives, and it sort of developed from there as we worked on these other projects and maybe to encourage young scholars, graduate students, listeners. It's actually amazing to go back to the material you once saw with other eyes and to say, you know, I, I didn't notice then, but here's a Jewish woman that I, I wasn't paying attention to because I was looking at money lending in Strasbourg. And then I, I see that while I noticed that this was a female money lender, I didn't think about it in the context of the history of Jewish women. And so much of our work came from just finding wonderful treasures as we did our projects. Side by side or in different places.
- [06:09]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Yeah, I mean, it's really. The book is fascinating and it's so rich with tremendous details that you're able to cull from these sources. And reading through your book, it reminded me. It made me think about some of the scholarship on ancient Jewish sources and women, and particularly scholars that look at, say, the Talmud and try to find references to women. And over there, I think there's an interesting challenge because there really is very. There are very few references to women where women actually speak or are referenced by name or something like that.
- [06:54]
Deborah Kaplan
That.
- [06:54]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
But you show in your book that that is very much not the case with the time period that you're focusing on. And you mention in the book that really, as you. Deborah just kind of alluded to, that there's actually a tremendous amount of sources in the archives of women who are named by name. And we get at least some detail about their life from these sources.
- [07:20]
Elisheva Kaubach
So let me jump on that, and then Deborah will complete the picture. That was what we all believed before we set out on our journey, that there are no sources. I was told by many great scholars of the early modern period when I said I found something interesting about this Jewish woman and that Jewish woman. And they said, there's nothing you can do with it because there are no sources. Many times I've heard this from many different people. And one of the things that our work in other directions prove to us is that there's an absolute abundance of sources. The moment you begin to attend to those voices, there are just a tremendous number of sources. So.
- [08:16]
Deborah Kaplan
We.
- [08:19]
Elisheva Kaubach
We began. I'm gonna.
- [08:22]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
This is an example of the modern directly intervening in conversation, where maybe in the pre modern or early modern period, there was much less of this.
- [08:32]
Elisheva Kaubach
There was much less of this. Instead, they were waiting for the letter carriers to come and bring them news from wherever. In fact, we discovered a husband and wife team who had this postal service between them. You could see how people awaited news of the outside world. So that's just a kind of digression, but we had several different, very important sets of sources that only became available or even extant in our period. So I think what we should do is maybe first define the period itself for a moment and explain why the early modern period produced these types of sources. And then we could talk about what they were. So we're talking at approximately 1500 till about 1800. And that's a period after some of the worst expulsions that decimated Jewish communities after the Black Plague, which also took a huge toll on Jewish communities by 1500, little by little, you begin to see the rebuilding, especially in Western Europe, which is our focus of our Book of New Jewish Communities. So there's a new establishment of what you might call community structures, and they become much more ramified as the communities grow. So that means that they need to have a much more organized framework. Lay leadership, elections to the leadership of the community, taxing the members of the community, charity for poor people, which Deborah has written a book about all of these different aspects of running a Jewish community. Now, convergence with keeping records, writing down all of these details, and a tremendous amount of material has survived until this day. We can't even begin to contemplate what has not survived. The depredations of time and hostility have. Just when you look at a record of taxes paid by Jews in a certain village or city, and then you see women who are heads of households and women who are single, women who are divorced, and women who are not listed separately because the norm for identifying taxpayers is the BAAL by it, the head of household gendered male. And we decided we were going to go after the heads of household gendered female, the balotbayit. So this is one thing I'm going to say it's a period during which the communities grew. And there's a whole other dimension to it that I'll let Deborah talk about. Sure.
- [12:03]
Deborah Kaplan
In addition to communal records that we just heard about, and there are so many different types of communal records that refer to women by name, we also have in this period a rise of literacy due to the invention of print and the spread of printed material. And so it's in the late 15th century that we have Gutenberg and his movable type, a printing press that allows for materials to reach a wider audience more quickly. Paper is less expensive than parchment, and so books are printed and spread. Many of these books are written in the vernacular. In our case, for the Jewish community, that would be Yiddish. And so you have books that are written for women. And we have wonderful examples of books written for women that give them access to various aspects of Jewish laws or specific commandments and prayers that were aimed towards women. We have women involved in every aspect of print. So one very early example is Estelina Konat, whose husband ran a printing press in northern Italy, where there was an important Ashkenazi community. And she was involved in printing one of the first Hebrew books that ever came to light. And that trend continued. We found women bringing books to print from the 15th century onward until the end of our period, which is about 1800. My personal favorite is a young girl named Ella who printed a book in her father's print shop when she was just nine years old. And on the first page, where she talks about the printing of the book, she says, please forgive any typos, because the person who set this up was only nine and also involved. So we have wonderful examples of women involved in print and even of women writing themselves. So this is a period where women become more visible through the different sources. And also, in addition, their literacy and their participation in Jewish communal life really increases because of this heightened literacy. So it's a very exciting period. I would just add, in addition to the communal records and the printed materials that I just mentioned, we also use different manuscripts in our book because manuscript culture does not disappear. So some of the prayers, beautiful illuminated manuscripts that were written for women, we have visual materials, beautiful pictures in some of these manuscripts, and also printed books. And we even found some material culture hats and pots that we're happy to discuss as well. But we try to draw on all of these different sources and to recreate the world that Jewish women experienced in this very rich period from 1500 to 1800.
- [14:55]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right. And, Elisheva, to go back to what you were kind of alluding to, how the communities, the Jewish communities in Europe during this period became more kind of developed, could you talk a little bit about the system of takanot that were enforced during this time and how these affected the lives of Jewish women?
- [15:21]
Elisheva Kaubach
Okay, so thank you. That's a great question. So just for our listeners who are not familiar with the term takanot are ordinances, pieces of legislation. They're not exactly law. Most Jewish communities had a set of founding takanot or ordinances, which function somewhat like a mini constitution almost. These are the guiding rules by which members must conduct themselves. People who violate takanot. There's a whole range of ways a community can discipline that could include fines. In fact, in one city, Altona, there is an enormous, enormous volume that lists all of the fines that were collected for minor infractions. So if you want to know all the curse words and insults that people hurled at each other around 1700 in Europe, you just go through the fine book. And it's very interesting because we also found that there's a kind of gender divide. Women were very often fined because of a question of morality, whereas for men, it was mostly questions of honesty. You called a man a thief, but for a woman, you called her something that would cast aspersions on her upstanding morality. So just as A tiny little window into that. But to step back about regulation, those are the founding regulations, but beyond that, many communities made regulations for all different types of circumstances. And then the communal scribe would indicate when people violated them or when questions arose. And that gives us a tremendous insight into the daily life, the regulations themselves. If a regulation says no women are allowed to attend a Brit mila anymore, as was the case in Halberstadt, for example, at one point, because it's too chaotic, circumcision. And then 10 years later, they say, well, we weren't successful with that, so from now on we're rescinding that takana. You get a sense of the women standing up for themselves and their right to be at a simcha, which they felt they ought to be. And that's just, again, a tiny glimpse. Every Jewish community maintained a sense of this, maintained this. So these are the kinds of regulations which lead to written sources. And this is something that's not even only unique to Jewish communities all over Europe. There's a heightened sense that you need to have social discipline, that various government entities, whether they're municipal or higher than that, need to get ever more into the private sphere of people's lives. And that also affects women, because.
- [19:07]
Deborah Kaplan
When.
- [19:07]
Elisheva Kaubach
You regulate, for example, the kind of foods people can buy and eat as a regulation that if you violate it, there's a punishment that affects women's lives directly, even if it doesn't regulate it only for women, because they're the ones who buy and prepare the food.
- [19:28]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right? Right. And I'm just curious. The rule against women being present at the circumcision ceremonies, the pritmila ceremonies for young boys, of course, was that regulation against the. The mother who had given birth to that child, or for women in general?
- [19:55]
Deborah Kaplan
We often see differences and local variations in some of these rituals. And it's important to sort of answer the question by talking about our sources. So in regulations, we're often talking about sumptuary regulations, which would limit the number of people that could attend a specific celebration, a wedding, another festive occasion in the synagogue, the circumcision. And so that was sometimes about curtailing the number of women. So the mother could be present or not present, depending on custom. And that differed in different times and different places. But sometimes you might have a celebration where only close female relatives would be encouraged to attend and the others would not be. As Elisheva mentioned in Halberstadt, they were completely unsuccessful. And the women came in other sources, such as custom books, which were written at this time period, we found Wonderful examples of women's celebrations on the way to the synagogue. Even in cases where the mother did not attend the circumcision, other women would have a sort of procession, sometimes even having a small drink before they would go on the procession and bringing the baby to the synagogue and then returning the baby to his mother to be nursed after the ceremony. And so it could be the mother, other female relatives. And it's very interesting because the lens that we get depends on whether it's a custom book that describes the ritual or if it's a set of ordinances or takanot that sought perhaps to limit the ritual in some way.
- [21:32]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right. Elisheva, I'm curious. Could you tell us about the active role that women played within the Jewish community and its institutions during this period?
- [21:46]
Elisheva Kaubach
So thank you for asking that really important question, because what we found is that unlike the very top tier of lay leadership, where people were elected and that was almost exclusively male, or I could say exclusively male, we haven't found any exceptions to that. Immediately beneath the formal elected leaders of the community as a whole was an entire network of what we called hevrot, or voluntary societies. And these covered a broad span of activities that were absolutely vital to the functioning of a Jewish community. These included what today would be called all types of social welfare organizations, feeding the hungry, tending to people who were ill, all kinds of charitable organizations, very prominent in virtually every Jewish community, the Chevre Kadisha, the society of people who attended to the dead. These were immensely important. And women had their own highly organized and in some cases actually record keeping organizations. And I'll let Deborah talk about one example in which the men tried to shut down a women's organization because they felt that the women were too successful in what they were doing, and it put them in a bad light.
- [23:29]
Deborah Kaplan
Yes, that was the burial society in Prague, which was very famous for its culture surrounding death, with all kinds of beautiful material items and paintings and manuscripts to accompany what might seem to listeners a very, very odd thing. You know, how. How much do you invest in taking care of the dead? But this was the highest honor to be part of the society. And the women's society was extremely innovative in trying to raise money, both through the sewing and selling of shrouds, because sewing was a woman's labor. And also even selling eyeglasses to raise funds for taking care of the poor, taking care of the sick, which is part of the duties of this society. And by reading some of the men's regulations, trying to shut down that particular slate of Women against the grain. We find out about their entrepreneurship, their success. The men then take away these women's right to be in charge of the society and bring in a whole new slate of women. And what's. What's sort of ironic is that they take over the selling of shrouds only several years later to say, it's really hard for us, and revert back to the very things that the woman had instituted themselves, because the women were. Were doing some of those things, such as making shrouds in advance for a reason. It was important to have shrouds in advance if you had, for example, a plague or multiple dead on the same day. So we learn a lot about women and their. Their devotion to their communities and the essential roles they played in their communities. I would. I would just add. Elisheva mentioned the Chevrot, these confraternities or sororities. I think it's important also to note that women were active in certain communal institutions in formal ways. And maybe I'll. I'll mention one role and then bounce back to you, Elisaba. For another, women were involved in running spaces that men were. Did not attend, such as, for example, the ritual bath. So we have women running ritual baths. Women would go to the ritual bath after their menstrual period, their period, in order to undergo a purification. Right. And so married women would go to this approximately once a month, depending on their cycle and their pregnancy and their breastfeeding. And women ran these spaces, and these spaces became formalized in this period as we talked about this period of regulation and order. And so we have women managing these spaces, collecting fees for immersion, which were newly instituted in this period, probably keeping records because someone had to keep track of the finances of this communal institution. And we see women's access, active involvement in these kind of spaces. Another wonderful example, Elisheva, maybe you want to talk about, is just briefly the. The midwives who played a leading role also in. In various capacities in the Jewish community.
- [26:35]
Elisheva Kaubach
Yes. So there's no such thing as a community without somebody to assist women in giving birth. In some places, they were highly trained. In the Netherlands, for example, I have a former doctoral student, now a professor in her own right, Jordan Katz, who's soon coming out with an absolutely marvelous book on the training and presence of Jewish women who actually went to medical school as early as 1700 and maybe even a little earlier to become licensed midwives. But even without the Netherlands, because the Dutch had a very advanced way of looking at that almost everywhere, women mostly, maybe exclusively, who had become Mothers themselves could train and become assistants to established midwives. And then they become midwives on their own. And we have found, and Jordan has located more, these midwives kept records, written records of every single birth they attended. And this is very important because people have to understand that unlike most municipalities or unlike most places where there's a parish where vital records are kept, births and deaths, Jews don't have those central organizations and that are collecting these statistics. And so the books left behind by circumcisers who record all the boys they circumcise, but more importantly, the midwives who record all the babies they help with the birth of, those are the only birth records we really have for many Jewish communities for. For many centuries. And the same with the records of the chevron qadisha, with the burial societies. Those are the records we have of death and epitaphs, of course, if the graves survive. So these are spaces. Jewish midwives were professionals. They are hired by communities. They're given terms sometimes very favorable. They're given residence in communities which are sometimes very, very difficult to obtain because they're considered so vital. And they are a very respected profession in their own right. So that's another very interesting profession. We came across. We came across women in many interesting professions.
- [29:35]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Yeah, this is all really fascinating. I'm just curious. Deb mentioned about the mikvah, about this process of immersion that women would go through during this in order to achieve this kind of religious purity in their married life. And I'm just curious, if I remember correctly, in your book, you mentioned that there's wonderful images and that you collected from this period. And if I remember correctly, there's an image of a woman going to the mikvah that was from, like, I don't know, the 1700s or something. And I have to say I was a little bit surprised that. That. That this image would have been created at that time depicting a woman, you know, unclothed, immersing in a body of water. And I'm curious, you know, are there other pictures like this was. Do we have any sense of who made the picture, when, how, and anything about that?
- [30:37]
Deborah Kaplan
We have various pictures of women immersing or preparing for immersion. And I would say they appear in three different genres. The first genre would be illuminated manuscripts, often small books of prayer, usually intended for women, but not always that depict a woman preparing for the ritual bath alongside with prayers that a woman would recite before or after immersing in the ritual bath. And so those are really beautiful and have magnificent color and detail. We Also found one interesting example, I think, from a very early 16th century custom book written in Yiddish from northern Italy, of a woman preparing maybe just bathing and not for ritual bath, now that I think of it before the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, but also in a state of undress. And that would have also been something. It was a manuscript for the consumption of the owner of the manuscript, who very well may have been a woman. We see many images of women in that manuscript. It's a fabulous manuscript discussed in a very important book called Picturing Yiddish by Diane Wolfthal for anybody that gets interested. She reproduces many of the images there and they're. They're quite lovely. And then the. The third genre is really works of Christian Hebraists, Christian scholars who were interested in Judaism and Jewish rituals and Hebrew texts in order to really understand the truth of Christianity. So it's a very interesting genre that merges with full force in this time period. And there we have some very interesting images of all kinds of Jewish rituals, including Jewish immersion in the mikvah. And that would have been produced by a non Jewish artist. We didn't include that in our book. There's a famous one, I think, in the book of Johann Jord Bodenschatz, if I'm not mistaken, who shows different scenes of women preparing and then immersing in the mikvah, in the ritual bath. So we do see these kinds of images, images of that ritual and of other rituals in these various genres.
- [32:56]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Fascinating. So so far, Shava, we've been speaking about kind of women who were central to their Jewish community, centrally part of the life of their community. I'm curious, could you talk to us about women who were pushed to the periphery of their communities and, and what types of behaviors merited this kind of treatment? And what do we know about these women's lives?
- [33:27]
Elisheva Kaubach
Thank you so much for that question. The margins are just as important to us as the center in a certain way. Sometimes it isn't the behavior of any individual that pushes them to the margins. What people need to understand is that when you look at Western Europe in the early modern period, people, but especially minorities, such as the Jewish people, could not just move to any place and begin to ply any trade. They felt like residents. And even travel from place to place was very highly regulated and expensive. You needed permits to be on the road and you needed many layers of license or permission to reside somewhere and to have the right to stay there. And then there's a whole other question about what you could do to Earn a living. Jews were excluded from almost all agricultural pursuits, from owning land, from owning their own homes. In certain places, not in others. This led to the impoverishment of many Jewish people. Now, poverty manifested in many different ways. And we talk about, for example, people who come to bigger cities, often from rural areas, to serve as servants in the homes of other Jews. And we have a whole section on maidservants. Because young Jewish girls were particularly vulnerable in various ways when they left their homes to work and to try to earn a minimum dowry so that they could set up a household. There were women who were parts of criminal gangs, Jewish criminal gangs who raided the countryside. Sometimes the women were involved in their husbands or family's exploits. Sometimes they were not. We found an absolutely fabulous story of a woman who was famous for knowing every highway and byway in the back roads of France, where her family purportedly ran a very successful criminal operation. And this woman was apparently their guide. She knew where they needed to go to evade any kind of detection and surveillance and penalties. So. But one of the other things we have found is that regardless of whether they were urban or rural, and there are many examples in our book of different ways that people either fell out of the center or were pushed out. Because sometimes various crimes of immorality or financial impropriety or whatever they are, could push a man or a woman to lose their membership and their right of residence in a community. And unless they were very well placed to get it somewhere else, they were homeless. They were stateless homeless vagrants who communities suspected of carrying disease, and they didn't want them. Very little has changed in communities, regard for the homeless people. But this was true for many Jews in those days. Now, communities did have charitable organizations that tried to help them. And what's so interesting to us is that no matter how marginal somebody was, we could often find connections to the center. Either because they came to the cities to stay in the hostel, which maybe Deborah wants to talk about the Heckdash, which is a whole little world in its own, which took care of both, sometimes ill people, but often wayfarers, and then they went on. Or they came to the big city to have a baby and to be assisted by a professional person. And then they went back to their life of vagrancy.
- [38:13]
Deborah Kaplan
Yes, maybe just about the hospice. I think it's a great example of how the community interacted with people from different economic classes. The hospice was a place where travelers could come and also poor people. More generally. The poor within the community often did not go to the hospice. Although we did find some examples where they did. And that evolved over time. So you might have vagrants or poor rural people coming into the hospice to give birth. We have examples also of babies receiving circumcisions in the hospice when their families couldn't afford to find what they needed for circumcision. That would include the festive meal afterwards and godparents. But we also found another layer of the Jewish community, and that would be the laboring poor people who worked in the hospice. So the hospice would be organized also by gender, with a man, a men's room and a woman's room, because they were tending to the ill and they were separated for reasons of modesty. And we found a wonderful example from Vienna of three generations of female hospice women who care for women in the hospice. They were also married to the male hospice men who took care of the hospice. And they would be in charge of taking care of the sick and inventorying the possessions of those who died in the hospice. And it was a wonderful opportunity also for people who were poor to be employed by the community and take care of those who are even more of need. And so, through institutions like the hospice and the records that they generated, whether inventories or regulations and takanot that you mentioned earlier, we are able to glimpse from the center these people on various levels of the margin. So it's a quite interesting institution that really allows us to see women's work and professions and also those women who were so poor that they came in just for the postpartum care that they might get, or the medical care that they might get, or any other support that they might need.
- [40:26]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right. And Deborah, you had mentioned before about print and women's involvement in not just producing books, but even writing them. And I'm curious, there was one episode that I thought was really quite fascinating about the kosher panim. Could you tell us what that was? That was really, really a fascinating insight.
- [40:53]
Deborah Kaplan
That was one of our favorite finds, I would say, that takes us right into the countryside in 16th century Germany, in the south of Germany, where, of all things, in a rabbi's responsum question that a rabbi was asked about Jewish law, we find what is probably the oldest surviving Yiddish love letter. The rabbi was approached by a man who was worried that his wife had committed adultery because he found in her private letter box, private jewelry box of sorts of letters that she had received from another man who called her term of endearment kosher panim, pure face. And her admired her snow white hand. And while we don't have her letter back because she sent it to her. We don't know her would be lover, her lover. We don't really know enough to see whether they consummated their relationship. We know from his letters that he received letters from her. And I think this speaks to what we were talking about earlier, the increased literacy that we see in this period where we have a woman, a young woman probably in 16th century Germany, sitting at her writing table writing very charming letters to a would be suitor. And yes, so while we have women involved in prints, we have women writing all kinds of texts, letters, wills, and we see writing in. In almost every aspect of women's daily lives.
- [42:31]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right, right. Just. Yeah, well, yeah, obviously, you know, as scholars, you appreciate this. As a reader, I just was blown away that there's this little snippet in a book that I don't know the very amateur historian in me. I just feel like. Like the whole thing could have gone the other way. You know, like, obviously, I mean, the husband found the letters.
- [42:54]
Deborah Kaplan
Fine.
- [42:54]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
The husband, you know, sent the letters or transcribed them and sent them to the rabbi. Fine. But did the rabbi have to include them in his responsa? Like he could have not, you know, he just as easily could have not. And he could have just said, oh, yes, about the letters. You asked me, you know, whatever. And we would never know, you know, the kind of charm of these letters. But because a rabbi hundreds of years ago happened to have included some snippets of these letters, now scholars could excavate them and kind of reconstruct, at least to some extent, what was the correspondence between this woman and her romantic interest.
- [43:40]
Deborah Kaplan
Yes. I would just add it's an amazing read because when you read the response that's in Hebrew, and then all of a sudden you have these lengthy Yiddish quotations from the letters and there's something very real about the whole thing. There were other examples that we found in Responsible as well, where someone would be insulted. Elisheva mentioned earlier fines and for cursing fights in synagogue courtyards where someone would say, you're dishonest. And someone would say, well, you have questionable sexual morality in much more colorful language in Yiddish. And then they would bring it before rabbi or before communal leaders with the entire quote. And you feel like you're standing in the courtyard listening to these people insult one another. And it's just an amazing glimpse into people's daily lives. Absolutely amazing.
- [44:33]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Speaking of that, Alesheva, could you tell us a little bit about the material worlds these women lived? Mundane and sacred objects they kept in their homes.
- [44:45]
Elisheva Kaubach
Sure. So let me begin by jumping off what we just discussed, which is not only did we find that rabbinic responsum from very early that gave us the language of this letter, but we found letter boxes, boxes that women that were made for women very often as wedding gifts. We found one with a Hebrew inscription on it from Nuremberg in the 16th century. And we found images in women's little tefilla manuscripts also of a woman who has a bracelet on her desk or on her table in her room. So we are looking for the material world of women as well. Where do you find information about that? One of our sources were inventories. So when a person died, the kehila would send an official congregation, a community would send an official to the home of the person who died. Very often it might have been just a room in someone else's home. Space was very, very dear, Especially in ghettos such as Frankfurt and Prague, which were not allowed to grow very much and would put the entire contents of the premises under seal. Nothing could be removed until all the person's heirs had put in their claims, all their creditors had put in the claims. The property would have been adjudicated. And in the course of doing that, an exact inventory would be taken of every single item, including pieces of underwear that belonged to women, including writing implements, including every kitchen implement. Every household item that this person had assembled over a lifetime is listed in the inventory. There's an entire volume in several places devoted to such inventories. We have one from Vienna, which has been published, and we have one from Altona, which has never been used before. Our book, to the best of my knowledge. And they're just absolutely marvelous. And then we sometimes have descriptions of homes. We have visual depictions of women inside their home, so we get a sense of what was on a table. Did they have wall hangings to adorn their homes? Some do and some don't. What were the dishes like? Where was the hearth where they kept warm and did their cooking? We are able to build a real sense of the inside of a home, what women put on their body. Another source for that are regulations that were called sometimes ordinances related to clothing, sidree begadim, which were made for two primary reasons. One is to reduce the amount of internal competition between Jews in terms of how fancy their dress was. And the other one was to limit the jealousy of non Jewish neighbors who would sometimes see conspicuous consumption and say, oh, those Jews have so much money. Where did they get that from? So between those two motivations, many, many communities issue Very, very detailed lists of what you could wear and when you could wear it. And only people of a certain social rank could wear this type of fabric. People of a different rank had to wear a different type of fabric. These kind of buckles were permitted, while another kind of buckles were not. If you start making lists, you get a real sense of everything from buttons to feathers to, you name it, this is the material that surrounded people.
- [49:14]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right, right. Absolutely. Absolutely fascinating. Speaking of the non Jewish neighbors, Deborah, I'm wondering how did the occupations, possessions and devotions of the Jewish women you explore compare to their Christian counterparts?
- [49:35]
Deborah Kaplan
So that's a wonderful question. Thank you so much. There are certain similarities that we see across religious lines. And when we look at economic and professional lives, in some sense, class was a bigger dividing line determining women's lives than gender was. So we have women of certain class more than religion was as well. So we see women of a certain class partaking in similar activities. But we also have professions that were much more common among Jewish women. So let me give a couple of examples to sort of illustrate what I'm talking about. Let's start with urban versus rural. You might find Jewish women involved in commerce alongside their husbands, which would have been similar among Christians. A difference between Jews and Christians would be that Jews were often involved in, in money lending, a profession that Christians were not involved in. So you might see women working alongside their husbands in both cases, but in different professions. But we saw women doing many other things. So Elisheva mentioned earlier in the podcast the female letter carrier Sarel, who established this mail carrying business with her husband. One was in Vienna, one was in Prague. And I think there we didn't look for a corollary in the non Jewish world. But the degree to which Jews were spread out, traveling, corresponding with one another, makes it logical that there would be, even though we were quite surprised to find that, that there would be Jews who were involved in carrying letters back and forth. If we move to the urban area, into the rural areas, we found women doing all kinds of things, selling vegetables, selling milk, selling chicks in the marketplace, which would have been very similar to what their Christian neighbors would have been doing as well. And then you have, you know, more extraordinary examples. So we have a phenomenon in this period called the court Jews, Jews who lent money and helped finance the highest princes of the land. And we found a wonderful example of a Jewish woman who was herself, herself a court Jew, Madame Kaula, Khayela Kaula. And she was involved in financing. And that was something that you wouldn't see in the Christian world. So there are some differences, some similarities. But there are some similarities might be women involved in sewing or women involved in other labors that were gendered as female. And I think that we found a, a very high and surprising number of Jewish women in various professions. We found their contracts and their letters and the degree to which they were deeply involved in their husband's businesses, even before, let's say, widowhood, when many of them took over independently. And you mentioned Glickel at the very beginning of this podcast. She's a primary example of a woman who I would say as a widow, took over her husband's business, but even earlier she wrote contracts while they were married. So that family economy is very common for the period. But the specific professions did have some distinctions according to class and also according to religion and the restrictions that governs Jewish professions more broadly for both men and women.
- [53:08]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Right. Very, very interesting. We're going to run out of time, so we're going to have to. There's so much richness and detail in your book, but we're going to have to end soon. But I'm curious, Elisheko, could you talk a little bit about the extent to which women were involved in Jewish rituals at home and in communal spaces?
- [53:32]
Elisheva Kaubach
So thank you for asking that. The answer is women were deeply pious, took their religion very seriously, both in the home and in the synagogue. We have found one of our, several of our sources. So there are wonderful custom books that detail women's roles in various customs, from life cycle type customs, birthday to death and marriages, to the calendar cycle customs. So for every holiday, the extent to which women were involved in the preparation for all kinds of religious activities is, again, it's impossible to imagine the functioning of the community without the labor that the women invested in making these things happen on many different levels. But we've used things like memorial books in which tiny little few lines of biography about a woman were recorded for posterity upon a little token payment by her family. And there we find dozens upon dozens of women lauded for things like attending synagogue services every day in the morning and in the evening, in the winter and in the summer. This despite the fact that they were also assisting with midwifery and also assisting with burial of the dead, and also often assisting in raising orphans in their homes and giving charity and visiting the sick. Like, it's absolutely incredible. We discover so, so many religious books of blessings, sidree brachot, and various prayers that were beautifully crafted to give to women as gifts. And they were using these books. They're often depicted using them inside the book. So you have a book that says these are your bedtime prayers, and inside the book there's an image of a woman sitting with a book of bedtime prayers. So we know they were using them. Literacy was growing. The fact that a woman could carry her own prayer book because they now, in the age of print, they weren't such a luxury item anymore, meant that many more women felt that they had a place and a role in public prayer. And this doesn't even touch upon the world of private prayer, of trinot. Maybe Deborah wants to jump in on that. And then we're talking about food preparation and the home and kosher food. The religious lives of Jewish women were vast and, again, very much part of the foundations of the Jewish community.
- [56:53]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
Yeah. So just because of time, we're going to have to leave it there. But I think that's as good a place as any to end our discussion for today. I want to thank you both so much for taking your time to share your thoughts with us.
- [57:05]
Deborah Kaplan
Thank you so much for having us and for asking us such interesting questions.
- [57:10]
Elisheva Kaubach
Thank you very, very much. We enjoyed the conversation.
- [57:13]
Host (Schneer Zalman Neufield)
That concludes our program. Thanks for listening and have a great day.